Presidents pick their favorite films

George H.W. Bush digs ‘Karate Kid’

except they are showing “Quiz Show” Saturday. Is the “Show Business Bible” inerrant?

Variety reported urgent news of Presidential flick picks in quiz format – urging readers to match First Fan with their favorite movie titles.

“Karate Kid” would make more sense, in that producer Jerry Weintraub’s sole visible claim to political fame is his legendary yet inexplicable friendship with George H.W. Bush.

Backwards in Britain

I got mine!

The Churchill family cashing in threatens to set the United Kingdom on the path to more presidentialism: cults of personality, motorcades, and our gift to the world, the presidential library.

History News Network reports they aren’t there yet, but are plugging away.

Britain has a functioning National Archives, but that can’t stop the empire builders. The Churchill papers were bought back from the family with public money, and rest at the Cambridge college named for him. Margaret Thatcher is tagging along there, but appears to be thin on actual material.

Her archive head says “What we have here …are the private letters to Baroness Thatcher from members of Parliament, copies of official letters that she was allowed to take with her and much more.”

The Thatcher web site illustrates the redundant nature of the enterprise:

“MT’s own collection includes copies of most of the White House material relating to her meetings with successive Presidents. Gaps in her collection have been filled, in some cases, from the Carter and Reagan Library photographic collections. Bush material will be placed on line with documentary material in early 2006.”

A search in multimedia for “Reagan” gets you nothing but White House photos. There are some bugs to work out on the site itself. Even the link to the Churchill archives is a bust.

The Churchill site is more fun, including Churchill’s memorandum calling for poison gassing Bolshevik troops during the British intervention in Russia’s Civil War.

The crazed, the cornball and the contemptuous come to the Clinton School in Little Rock.

First up, candidate/comedian Alan Keyes! Flamboyantly demonstrating that The Clinton will not be bound by hidebound liberal nostrums, they are opening their doors to the renowned nut/commentator.

The Clintonists recently hosted former White House Counsel and failed Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers, on-the-lam from a Congressional subpoena for a “private session.”

If Keyes overnights in Little Rock he can do lunch next day with cheesy Mitch Albom at the First Annual Clinton School Scholarship Luncheon! The Five People You Meet In Heaven author shares his tales from beyond the grave for a hundred bucks a pop.

Feel the smarm!

If Keyes does stick around for the lunch they can compare notes on their mutually troubled* MSNBC show experiences.

*Keyes’s bitterness over his 2002 dumping by America’s third rated cable news network continues in the form of an online petition protesting the crime, still available on his web site!

Vanity Fair‘s “White House Civil War” account of Gore-Clinton spats and slights recalls those heady days when nothing seemed impossible, the President spoke in coherent sentences, and the White House was mired in minutia. When school uniforms walked like men, and V-chips promised to end filth as we knew it.

The piece excerpts from Salley Bedell Smith’s “For Love of Politics—Bill and Hillary Clinton: The White House Years,” following the resource competition between Gore and Hillary Clinton’s 2000 campaigns for President and Senator.

Apparently the fate of the Republic turned on the teen marketing of “Resident Evil,” and whether Al Gore or Hillary Clinton would be credited with denouncing this scourge.

“One of the most dramatic examples occurred in September as the Federal Trade Commission prepared to release a report on violence in the media. The agency’s million-dollar study showed that entertainment companies were marketing violent movies, video games, and music to children under 18. Under ordinary circumstances, a vice president running for the presidency would have first call on publicizing the report. But Hillary insisted she should handle the rollout because she had already called for a universal ratings system. “It was a key point of her Senate campaign,” said Bruce Reed. “The president had singled her out for that in the 2000 State of the Union, so the finding of the F.T.C. was directly relevant to her campaign. The vice president’s campaign had concluded that cultural issues were hurting him, and they were dying to announce the report as well.”

An alternative reading of events might be that the September 11, 2000 [did the Mossad do this one too?] FTC release was a side show. Gore appeared on Oprah to lament kids today, while Bush kept his eye on the ball campaigning. In Florida.

In other news, the article confirms the status of former Clinton and Gore staffer Bob Boorstin as a national resource. His “I find her to be among the most self-righteous people I’ve ever known in my life” quote on Hillary to Carl Bernstein got a lot of play, and in the Vanity Fair piece he tops himself:

“Did we make mistakes? Yes. Would I say that Clinton was the only reason we lost? No. Would I say with absolute zero doubt in my mind that we would have won the election if Clinton hadn’t put his penis in [Lewinsky’s] mouth? Yes. I guarantee it.”

The National first Ladies Library is losing the sugar daddy who brings in four-fifths of it’s income. The Library is based in a Canton Ohio house once belonging to President William McKinley and wife Ida, and serves up a weird amalgam of decorating and democracy, a great deal of former White House china with a side bar of first lady anecdotes.

Retiring Ohio Republican Representative Ralph Regula has funneled cash to the Library for years through his position on the House appropriations Committee. The First Ladies’ most recent filing shows government grants accounted for $1,028,991 of the Library’s $1,344,415 revenue.

The Library’s Founder was sort of coy with CNN on where it all came from:

“You know, surprisingly, it hasn’t been difficult to raise the raise the funds. It seems to be an idea whose time has come. We raised over three and a half million from private and corporate funds.”

And she’s not sweating to do it either. The Library’s most recent filings for have her paid $68,808 for a 30 hour week.

She’s Regula’s wife Mary.

What does the money buy? They have a building and a library, from which they launch educational programs such as “Right To Read “The White House Pets”‘ Grades: K-6

“A First Lady will relate stories about many of the Presidential pets and the families who loved them. The program continues with a First Lady reading a book to your class with the help of puppets and possibly a willing student.”

They sell tchotskies in some way connected with first ladies, with Betty Ford and Nancy Reagan not represented.

You can save big on the Laura Bush China Box – prices slashed to $24.95 from $53.00!

Some of their expenses seem odd. In 2004, the most recently available yearly report, they spent $94,000 on “website update.” Look at the thing.

They paid Carl Sverrazza Anthony a hundred thousand dollars for his services as an author and historian in 2004. Anthony has carved out a specialty writing not terribly deep tomes commemorating first ladies and their offspring. The Library appears to be sponsoring him in writing a biography of McKinley’s wife Ida Saxton, the first volume of which has appeared this year. No information on their web site about who gets the book’s royalties if any.